ACE: Availability-Aware CloudSim Extension

In the interconnected globe where service delivery is the success measure, cloud high availability (HA) is an indispensable area for enterprises. An HA-aware cloud system provides different approaches to handle the outages. This includes geo-redundancy, failover schemes, and HA-aware placement solutions. However, using real-cloud platforms to model HA-aware approaches is hindered by the configuration settings. To this end, simulation tools, such as CloudSim, can be used to evaluate HA solutions and a cloud resiliency against failures. CloudSim allows implementing of scheduling policies, but it does not support HA properties. This paper provides availability-aware CloudSim extension (ACE). ACE extends CloudSim with a graphical and textual modeling to ensure simplicity and reusability of cloud scenarios. ACE has added HA-aware modeling (HA metrics and failure/redundancy/interdependency models) and HA-aware scheduling (HA-aware placements, failover, repair, and load balancing policies) into CloudSim. With ACE, the creation of cloud scenarios is facilitated, and multiple HA-aware deployment solutions can be evaluated under different stochastic and deterministic events. ACE can assess the impact of different redundancy/failure models, and other performance policies to extract HA-aware lessons. In this paper, ACE is assessed on a cloud application to evaluate different redundancy/failure models and provide availability analysis of the HA-aware placement solution.